“Yes.”
He took more, kept them both swaying on that high wire between need and release, until it built beyond the bearing, until he let the wire snap beneath the weight.
—
Because she felt a little drunk, Naomi took great care packing her equipment. He’d taken her beyond her own boundaries of control, and somehow she’d allowed it. She’d need time and space to decide, to understand, what that meant.
And now wasn’t the time, not when everything in her felt so soft and vulnerable. When she could still feel his hands on her.
She packed her tripod, a camera bag, a case, a light stand, diffuser.
He walked in, smelling of her soap. “All that?”
“Better to have everything than leave behind the one thing you realize you need.”
She started to swing on a backpack.
“I’ve got it. Christ, does everything include bricks?” He picked up her tripod case, the light stand, started out.
As she picked up the rest, Tag barked as if dragons burned down the gates.
“Car’s coming,” Xander called back. “I’ve got it.”
“He’s got it,” she murmured. “That’s the problem. Why am I mostly okay that he’s got it?”
“Easy, killer,” Xander told the dog, and opened the front door. He recognized the official vehicle just pulling up beside his truck, and the chief of police behind the wheel.
“Relax, he’s one of the good guys.” Xander stepped off the porch, carted the equipment to his truck. “Hey, Chief.”
“Xander. Is that the stray I heard about?”
“Yeah. That’s Tag.”
“Hey there, Tag.”
Chief of police Sam Winston, a toughly built man with a smooth face the color of walnuts and a Waves cap on his close-cropped hair (the high school football team where his son stood as quarterback), crouched down.
Tag, nervous, crept close enough to sniff.
“He’s a good-looking dog.”
“Now, he is.”
Tag accepted the head scrub, then immediately ran back to Naomi when she came out.
“Ma’am.” Sam tapped the brim of his cap. “I’m Sam Winston, chief of police.”
“Is something wrong?”
“I’m not sure about that. I’ve been meaning to come up, introduce myself. It’s good someone’s back on the bluff, and from what I hear—and can see for myself—you’re giving the old girl a face-lift. She needed one. You got Kevin Banner and his crew on it, I hear.”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t do better. Looks like I caught you two on the way out.”
“Naomi’s going to take some pictures of the band.”
“Is that so?” Sam hooked his thumbs in his thick Sam Browne belt, gave a little nod. “I bet they’ll be good ones. I don’t want to keep you, and it saves me time to find you both here. It’s about Marla Roth.”
“If she’s trying to push an assault charge, I’ll push back. Again,” Naomi said.
“I can’t say if she’d go there. We can’t seem to find her.”
“Still?” Xander put in, turned back from stowing the equipment.
“Nobody’s seen or heard from her, the way it looks, since Friday night. Not long after your scuffle with her, Ms. Carson.”
“If she’s still pissed about that, she could’ve taken off for a few days,” Xander began.
Worn boots planted, Sam gave the bill of his cap a little flick up. “Her car’s at her house, and she isn’t. Chip finally broke in the back door this morning, then came back to see me. She didn’t go in to work yesterday, isn’t answering her phone. She could be in a snit, and it’s most likely she is, but Chip’s worried sick, and I need to look into it. Now, the story I’m getting is she went at you at Loo’s on Friday night.”
Missing could mean anything, Naomi assured herself. Missing didn’t mean an old root cellar in the deep woods. More often, much more often, it just meant a person had gone somewhere no one had looked yet.
“Ms. Carson?” Sam prompted.
“Sorry, yes. That’s right. She knocked into me a couple of times, then shoved me a couple of times.”
“And you clocked her one?”
“No, I didn’t hit her. I took her wrist, gave it a twist—leverage, pressure point, so she went down. So she stopped shoving me.”
“Then what?”
“Then I left. It was annoying and embarrassing, so I left and came home.”
“By yourself.”
“Yes, I came home alone.”
“About what time do you think that was?”
“About ten thirty.” Just doing his job, Naomi reminded herself, and took a deep breath. “I let the dog out, walked around with him for a while. I was angry and upset, and couldn’t concentrate on work.”
“And I got here about twelve thirty.” Though Xander leaned negligently back on his truck, irritation edged his voice. “The dog got us up just after five, and I left about seven thirty, maybe a little before. Come on, Chief.”
“Xander, I’ve got to ask. Patti’s been screeching about Ms. Carson attacking Marla—she’s the only one with that take,” he added before Xander could speak. “And even she’s backed off that mark. But the fact is, Marla stormed out of Loo’s in a temper about twenty minutes after Ms. Carson, and as far as I can determine, that’s the last anyone saw her.”
Sam huffed out a breath, petted the dog, who now apparently found him delightful. “Did either of you see her with anybody, somebody she might’ve taken it into her head to go off with?”
“She was sitting with Patti.” Xander shrugged. “I try not to notice Marla too much.”
“I saw her at her table, with her friend, earlier in the evening.” Tense now, Naomi rubbed her neck. “I was sitting with Kevin and Jenny. I really wasn’t paying attention to her, until Jenny and I got up to dance and she . . . I don’t even know her.”
“I understand that, I do, and I don’t want you to worry about this. She probably went off with somebody she met at the bar, to lick her wounds and get Chip worked up.”
Naomi shook her head. “A woman who’s pissed off and upset? She’s going to talk to her girlfriend.”
“They had a bit of a falling-out after the incident.”
“Regardless. Even if she called this Patti to argue, or at least send her a bitchy text.”
“We’ll be looking into it. I’m not going to keep you, but I’d like to come back sometime, see what you’re doing inside.”
“Yes, sure.”
“You have a good day. I’ll be seeing you around, Xander.”
Naomi’s insides twisted as Sam got back in his cruiser.
“Will he really look?”
“Yeah, of course. He’s the chief.”
“Has anyone else ever gone missing?”
“Not that I know of, and I would. Hey.” Xander put a hand on her arm. “Marla’s the type who looks for trouble, likes to cause it. It’s just the way she is. The chief will do his job. Don’t worry about this.”
He was right, of course. Marla was a troublemaker and had very likely hooked up with some guy for the weekend to boost her wounded ego.
Not every woman who went off that way ended up raped and murdered. It had never happened here before, Naomi reminded herself. Hadn’t she checked into just that after she’d fallen for the house?
Low crime rate, even lower violent-crime rate. A safe place. A quiet place.
Marla would probably show up before nightfall, pleased she’d worried her ex-husband, her friend, had the police out looking for her.
She put it out of her mind, as much as she could, as Xander pulled away from the house in the truck, with the dog riding with his head out the window and his ears flying in the breeze.
LIGHT AND SHADOW
Where there is a great deal of light,
the shadows are deeper.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Sixteen
When he’d realized she was serious about taking pictures in his place, Xander had considered pulling the Simon Vance book off the shelf. He’d done so long enough to read it again, refresh himself, then had nearly tossed it into the box he kept for donations.
He didn’t want to see that dull, stricken look on her face again.
In the end, he decided pulling it off gave it too much importance. She knew it was there, and would wonder why he’d taken it away.